Pure Geekery

First impressions count, and when I visit a site the first thing that hits me is the general design. A site may have the best content there is on the Net, but if it looks like a dog’s dinner I’ll often move on before getting round to reading what it actually says.

If you’re a Wordpress user there are loads of places where you can find themes. You can find a theme to fit pretty much and design you want… dark, light, magazine layout, or even themed to look like an iPhone. I’ve been blogging since 2003 and have done the tour of themes more than once but I can honestly say there’s only one I would use now: Thesis from DIY Themes.

What makes Thesis different?

Thesis‘ customisability is its strength. It’s fairly plain out of the box, and if you take a look at http://www.dslrnewb.com you’ll see the basic setup. Geek-Speak itself also runs on Thesis and hasn’t been customised too heavily other than adding a logo, advertising banner, and changing the background colour to blue. Adding the logo and ad required a little coding (I got loads of help from the DIYThemes.com community) but changing colours, fonts, adding columns, and constructing custom navigation is all done with the Thesis options pane… no coding required!

If you’re feeling particularly brave you can access several “hooks” that allow you to add custom code to various parts of the page. Basically, Thesis lets you customise your site and accommodates both people who are willing to delve into the techie code and those who just want to select options from a menu.

Is it good for SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation is key if you want to gain traffic from the search engines, and Thesis gives you powerful options to help with this: a custom title tag, meta description and tags, and the option to add a noindex instruction to a page if, for some reason, you don’t want that page included in the search engines’ indexes.

OK, how much?

Here’s the point where you have to decide whether you really want to go with Thesis or not. It costs $87 for a personal license and $164 for a developer’s license. The difference is that with the developer’s option you can deploy Thesis to any of your clients’ sites and remove the Thesis credit from your site’s footer, whereas the personal option can only be deployed to one site and keeps the credit in the footer. If you’re looking for a theme for your own blog I’d recommend going for the cheaper personal option, as you can upgrade to the developer one later if you want to.

Thesis is by no means cheap, but I believe you get what you pay for. I genuinely think it’s worth the money and would recommend that you at least consider it as your Wordpress theme. The guys at DIY Themes say you’ll never change your theme again… and I believe them.

Visit DIY Themes to check Thesis out and buy if you think it’s right for you.

I am an affiliate for Thesis – if you purchase the theme via any links in this article I will earn a commission on your purchase.

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